Is Cynicism a Good Starting Point?

Reviewing The Cynic's Guide to Wine by Sunny Hodge

Sometimes I feel like I stepped into the movie Groundhog Day. Polemics against natural wine have been a regular and unchanging refrain for lazy wine hacks for over a decade - and they continue to appear. The same tired arguments and stale tropes are inevitably brokered. Invoking a bit of inverse-snobbery is a popular tactic. Cue rah-rahing from the comments section. Conclusion? It’s always the hipsters’ fault.

Hasn’t anyone got anything new to say? Why do people insist on compartmentalising everything? Can no-one get it into their heads that wine, and particularly natural wine, is an ever-evolving picture that doesn’t always fit easily into neat little boxes?

When I heard about Sunny Hodge’s The Cynic’s Guide to Wine, it sounded like the perfect tonic. Although I recoiled in horror as I read the hackneyed phrase “Sunny Hodge is on a mission to demystify wine” on the back cover, there’s a great deal about this book that piqued my interest. Hodge’s intention is to debunk, to cut through the BS and to dig under the covers of well-worn clichés which he feels don’t help us understand why wine tastes the way it does.

Although he originally studied for a masters in engineering, Hodge fell into the hospitality trade before he then got the wine bug. He opened his first wine bar, Diogenes the Dog, in London in 2018, followed by a second - Aspen & Meursault - in 2021. In the book’s introduction, he describes his frustration as he tried to advance his own wine education:

Food and cocktails were quantifiable and spoken about technically: ways of curing, time in lemon juice, millilitres of vermouth, it all made logical sense. But wine was shrouded in mystery. Sommeliers spoke of clay and chalky soils but couldn’t explain what difference it made to the wine.

Hodge’s shtick is that wine lovers and professionals have accumulated a bunch of vague, pseudo-scientific factoids that we love to trot out, while not having the faintest idea about what they really mean. Terroir, minerality, natural wine, organic farming and microbes are some of the topics he feels are particularly poorly understood.

I like the premise, and I agree with Hodge that much wine-talk can be over-romanticised gibberish. The wine world could benefit from his questioning nature. Hodge seems like the kind of person who can’t resist shaking something up and down to see what makes it tick. I suspect he would make a good dinner companion.

But what about the book?

I didn’t quite get the title, which sounded very negative. The inspiration behind it isn’t fully explained within the covers either. I hunted down this podcast, where Hodge outlines it in more detail. In short, the Greek philosopher Diogenes popularised the philosophical construct of cynicism, which didn’t originally have the same negative connotations that the word now carries. The “rejection of conventional manners” is I guess the part that fascinates Hodge, and the book title is supposed to reflect the idea of questioning everything, not blindly accepting received wisdom.

The book dives straight in with two extremely scientific chapters. Chapter 1, Roots, goes deep into how vines function, and why their root systems are so important. Everything you ever wanted to know about cation exchange, mycorrhizal symbiosis and more is here. There’s a detailed breakdown of minerals and nutrients found in the soil, and how the vine interacts with them. TL;DR: You can’t taste minerals directly in the wine, the way in which soils influence the final product is vastly more complex.

Chapter 2, Debunking ‘terroir’, is scarcely less rigorous, going into exhaustive detail about soils, sedimentary rock, humus and their effects on wine. Hodge laments that humus and micro-organisms are never talked about in the context of the word terroir. “Microbial prejudice has run rife for centuries” he says. You’ve got to love someone who can squeeze a sentence like that into their canon.

I have to admit that despite the crisp prose, my attention wandered over these pages. They were just a bit too factoidly dense for me. By the time Hodge was done explaining how vines or rock layers functioned, I’d forgotten what the relevance was to what ends up in my glass. You’d need to have a seriously scientific bent to get the most out of this material. I’d question whether most wine lovers - including myself - need or want to go this deep.

Nevertheless, Hodge’s enthusiasm for these very technical subjects comes across loud and clear. The writing feels confident and well researched. However, as the book progresses into more nebulous, philosophical areas such as farming practice and natural wine, it gets weaker.

The brief history of organic and biodynamic practices in chapter 3 has good insights - many won’t be aware that Steiner’s biodynamic philosophy preceded the development of the modern organic farming movement. I also enjoyed Hodge’s neutral but questioning stance about the efficacy and sustainability of organic farming methods. He neither preaches nor writes like an industry shill. However, the controversial issue of copper usage threw up a barage of confusion.

I would have loved a clear explanation of what the EU legislation around the use of Bordeaux mixture and various other copper-based compounds actually means on the ground. But Hodge made it more rather than less confusing, first stating that Bordeaux mixture is banned by 18 EU states¹, before going on to talk about how its component parts are allowed within the constrains of organic farming.

As we head into the murky waters of natural wine definitions and legislation, Hodge seems a little under-researched compared to where he was with the science. Talking about the many private winemaker’s associations that have sprung up to regulate and promote natural wine he says “these rules are based on trust since nobody is paid to go around and check!” Vinnatur, who Hodge namechecks, might be surprised to read this, since they analyse wines for pesticide residues and organise site visits to up to 30% of their 200+ members each year. The voluntary labelling scheme Vin Méthode Naturelle, which has been gradually gaining popularity in Europe since its introduction in 2019, also has a mechanism for random checks.

Next, Hodge tackles the anatomy of the grape, before proceeding to fermentation and yeasts. As someone who runs what is ostensibly a natural wine bar - at least the list at Aspen & Meursault is described as low intervention wines - I was expecting a strong stance in favour of non-interventionist techniques such as wild fermentation. However, Hodge sits on the fence, first making a considerable case for inoculation (“indigenous or wild yeasts are often too unpredictable for large-scale commercial wine production”, before ending with a rhetorical question whose answer he bizarrely doesn’t tackle:

Could it be that we have lost this biological aspect of place by using commercial yeasts instead of indigenous ones?

Many of the statements about fermentation felt academic and not grounded in practice. Hodge asserts that spontaneous fermentations (ie: those working purely with wild yeasts) are cooler and slower than those with inoculated lab yeasts. This certainly wasn’t my experience last year, when I had a tub of red grapes in Herzegovina that more or less finished its entire alcoholic fermentation in three days at temperatures of above 30C.

I don’t want to pore over minutiae; there is plenty of useful information in this part of the book, along with another exhaustive trawl through every single flavour compound that can be found in the glass. But when Hodge tackles topics such as filtration and clarification, he makes a statement that struck me as extraordinary for anyone who has ever defended low-intervention winemaking:

Natural wines are seen as living products which aren’t meant to be as time hardy as conventional wines.

Seen by who, I wondered. The idea that low intervention, unfiltered wines made with little or no added sulphur can’t age is a myth put around by mainstream enologists and chemical companies. It’s patently untrue, and I wanted Hodge to explain why: if you sterile filter and clarify a wine, you remove a great many useful compounds and solid parts that might actually guard against oxidation or other spoilage. The more a wine has been processed, the less hardy it is likely to be - hence the need for higher sulphite additions. That’s my pseudo-scientific version at least, based on considerable anecdotal evidence of enjoying bottles of 20 or 25 year old natural wine over the years.

The book finishes with a chapter on flavour perception. Hodge covers some super interesting neuroscientific concepts here. Digging into how our genetic makeup affects our ability to smell or taste is fascinating stuff.

There’s a lot to chew on in this book’s 239 pages (of which four are, bravo, a properly realised index). Much of it is thought-provoking, but I was left with one big question. Is it really useful to understand wine down to the tiniest chemical detail? I’m not honestly sure that’s going to help me enjoy my next glass of low intervention Chilean Chardonnay. In the book’s conclusion Hodge states “with your newfound understanding of cation exchange you’ll be able to probe what you’re told about soil and terroir at a tasting….” I wish it were so, but I’m not convinced. In the podcast, he talks about “helping customers understand wine technically, [with] less of the story.”

But isn’t it the story that captures our attention and stays with us?

I love the idea of shaking things up and changing the narrative on wine. Even if I’m unsure whether The Cynic’s Guide to Wine is the right way to go about it, I certainly enjoyed the ride. And I know that Sunny Hodge will come to the table with something different and save me from Punxsutawney Phil.

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Sunny Hodge’s The Cynic’s guide to Wine is published by Academie du Vin Library Ltd on 24th April 2025. It’s available from all the usual outlets. Go somewhere else than the rainforest guys if you possibly can.

My copy was provided for review.

1. I couldn’t verify either the figure of 18 states or the statement that Bordeaux mixture is banned per se. I’m also no closer to understanding how the approval by individual EU member states interacts with an overall EU ruling.